In December of last year, the CDMS-II team came across possible evidence of dark matter, though what they think may be weakly interacting mass particles, or WIMPS, may also just be background noise. In fact, there is a one-in-four chance that this is the case, and that the evidence was not a breakthrough discovery.
Two events detected by CDMS-II experimenters caused a lot of excitement in the scientific community, as they seemed to be characteristic of WIMPS, hypothetical particles that could be heavier than atomic nuclei. The experiment is located in a facility half a mile under the ground, and it consists of 30 detectors made of germanium and silicon cooled to near absolute zero. Radioactive decays and cosmic rays are also capable of producing signals that the experiment was meant to detect.
Physicists working with the data said this in a summary: “Scientists have a set criteria for determining whether a new discovery has been made, in essence that the ratio of signal-to-background events must be large enough that there is no reasonable doubt. Typically there must be less than one chance in a thousand of the signal being due to background…so we can make no claim to have discovered WIMPs.”
[Source: physicsworld.com]
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